What brings digital marketers to online communities?

After a long break, we are back with our AMA roundup. Another week for the Digital marketing community gotta admit it is the hot buzzword lately.

Meet Karan Parwani the CMO at Buzet Web & Digital. A Passionate Digital Marketer, a Proud Blog Owner at KaranParwani.com which is his business blog and hosts of one of the fastest-growing Marketing Podcasts in India, The Karan Parwani Show.

He also founded and runs Digital Marketing Practitioners (DMP) community that houses 2000 plus DMPs and is two-year-old now.

Let us delve deeper into the AMA session to know more about Digital marketing trends, Communities, KPIs that a community manager should keep an eye on, and much more.

We asked Karan Parwani to share with us his journey of building his community of 2000 members in two years. And we were inspired by his journey. Let us hear it from Karan!

“I started with my network on Facebook. Where I was part of a 150K+ Digital Marketing related Facebook Group which was considered one of the biggest ones all over the world.

I started posting content about my case studies, marketing tips, etc, and slowly got a lot of engagement, appreciation, and DM's letting me know about the good work I was putting in (hard work literally paid off).

While I was a valuable member, I also decided to go LIVE on the group and answer every digital marketing-related question asked which helped me to make better connections with every member.

One fine day, I decided to start my own community and name it around what is required in today's world for a Marketer to be successful, & that is to become a 'Practitioner'. This is a term used mostly in Medical Sciences, so I decided to use it here. Hence the name ‘Digital Marketing Practitioners(DMP)’. I then invited all of the connections I made during my 'value-driven' in the old group and within 5 days had the group filled up to 100 Members.”

How does members' persona affect the community's overall persona?

We are curious to know how to choose and invite the members to a community?

What type of audience you invite, is what persona the community evolves into eventually. Can’t emphasize it because I invited people to my community who are into digital marketing and they made the environment friendly for advanced discussions as well.

Karan Parwani says that he once posted and encouraged introverts to post their questions in the community while ensuring they will receive answers to their questions. In the next few hours, the whole community was flooded with Introverts asking their questions and getting answers.

Post that, the ecosystem started to shift with members replying to each other's comments and helping themselves out which resulted in a collaborative culture. People don't shy as they know they will receive constructive feedback or valuable answers.

This is the exact thing on which the community is all about. It should run eventually on the admins not being involved and community growth led by the community itself.

Why are your Community moderators called saviors?

My Moderators are called 'Saviours' or 'Saviors' – because they protect the community's integrity and ethics.

It has been over a year and a half since my community moderators have been moderating the DMP community — Never faced any spam reports, comments, or any external issues.

I keep rewarding our Saviours from time to time in the form of cash, gift cards, books, or tools, Reason? Motivation to dream big.

Reason: 'Saviors'.

What are the different KPIs should you track as a community manager?

As a Community Manager you should track the following :

Quality Engagement
More Members helping each other (determines Community Integrity)
More Members posting themselves (Remembrance of where they can get solutions for their problems apart from Google)
More Engagement during AMA's (determines community's willingness to grow and learn more)
Monthly request to join the community which determines how many people want to rush into it
If members remember our community after relating to it around the Internet (attached a screenshot with this reply so you can witness).

We asked Karan Parwani to throw some spotlight on how digital marketing is going to evolve in the future, and he gave us a list of marketing strategies. Let us take a look at it.

New digital marketing paradigm

Right now we're on the cusp of a new digital marketing paradigm, and in order to up your digital marketing strategies, here are 7 strategies to tackle and strengthen your marketing strategies:

Community-led growth

Community-led growth is inevitable for both the product and creators. It is shaping and paving ways for the new digital paradigm shift. Predominantly it helps in 2 ways :

a) Get early feedback for your Minimum Viable Product and feedback to improve the product further so you can release a better version to the market.

b) Community is your tribe. The more you build in public the faster you can grow.

Grow stronger with Omni-Channel Marketing

Leveraging all the platforms for your growth plus repurposing them to your advantage will lead to brand discovery and high sales opportunities. Leveraging all the paid channels, social media, Email (Owned Audience), SMS, etc. would drive collective growth, hence relieving your CAC (Cost of Acquiring Customers).

It is high time to up your Twitter Game

A lot of individuals learned more from Twitter threads than any generic course out there. Twitter received a huge turnaround in 2020-21 when a lot of Startups/Creators/Entrepreneurs initiated interesting Twitter Threads on subjects that piqued the curiosity of many people. Great way to up your marketing strategy on Twitter.

YouTube and Instagram are going to rope in more attention

As the attention span of Individuals is declining Y-o-Y, it becomes important to convey your message shortly and crisply. That is where Reels and YouTube Shorts play a major role.

Facebook is even using Reels as one of the placements in advertising where you can showcase your ads. You can also test it yourself to determine the CPA (Cost Per Action).

More Emphasis on Analytics

Data is the new oil as they say. If you master this skill, your value and worth increase automatically. You can practice and learn with dummy data provided by Google and improve your analytical skills using Google Analytics.

YouTube is not a choice, but a necessity

If you have ignored YouTube, you have left enormous chunks of money on the table.

Growing your own channel is very powerful when you are consistent and give quality content to audiences. Data distribution is necessary to gain customers from different platforms.

Be future-ready for Web 3.0

As Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta-verse to be inculcated in Advertising, Marketing trends are going to shift(More AR/VR Concepts), more advertising methods will change. So, as a digital marketer, it is time to start researching and be future-ready for the tectonic technology shift.

And it goes on and on…

To know more about different platforms to do marketing answered by Karan Parwani and many more related to marketing trends and strategies check out our AMA session here.

Oh by the way, if you have any questions related to community-building, or you are a community enthusiast waiting to ask your questions, then do join our Community cold coffee community and ask your questions every Wednesday AMA session. We would totally love to have you as a part of our community and will be hyped to catch you there!

Share with us your journey of building your digital marketer community